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To paraphrase Dostoevsky, one can measure the degree of civilization in a country by traveling its roads.
I learned this the hard way on a recent reporting trip to Finland. To catch my departing flight, first I had to rent a car to drive from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to Newark airport. Then, en route, not only did I have to deal with the usual stress of having to balance the risk of getting a speeding ticket against the risk of getting into an accident by driving too slowly, I also got to meet some deranged hooligans straight out of “Mad Max.” Perhaps 15 or 20 souped-up cars and trucks, with deafening glass packs and side-dump exhausts, appeared suddenly around Stroudsburg, driving perhaps 100 miles per hour, weaving between lanes and onto the shoulder. One of them abruptly cut me off, nearly causing me to crash into another car.
It’s a familiar experience for anyone who drives, bikes, or walks on an American street. Hyper-vigilance is the natural response to roads filled with big, heavy, powerful cars and trucks driven at high speed, and often by people with a contemptuous disregard for anything but their own convenience and kicks.
So when I got to Finland to pick up a rental car, I was still amped. It’s a foreign country, and getting to my hotel meant I had to drive through the middle of the capital city. Surely this would be difficult.
It was not. I was surprised to learn that driving in downtown Helsinki is actually quite easy and safe — and later as I walked around the city, so is walking, cycling, or riding an electric scooter. What’s more, most of the road design policies that have made it so easy and safe to move around, drastically reducing carbon emissions in the process, are relatively simple. Even a sprawling American suburb could adopt most of them, with great effect.
The first and most important policy is to slow down traffic in towns and cities. Finland does have high-speed highways, but the speed limit only hits 120 kilometers per hour (about 75 miles per hour) far outside any settlement and only during the summer. Elsewhere, limits have been progressively reduced over the years. In the Helsinki suburbs, a limit of 80 kph, or 50 mph, is enforced with speed cameras. Further into the city, as the roads pick up more traffic and become more complex, the highway speed drops to 60 kph (37 mph), or even 50 kph (31 mph). On local city streets, the limit drops to 30 kph (18 mph), and most streets are narrow and paved with rough stone that, together with raised crosswalks, effectively force people to drive even slower.
A Finnish speeding ticket, which is levied as a percentage of one’s income, is no joke. Back in June, a wealthy businessman named Anders Wiklöf was fined121,000 euros for doing 82 kph in a 50 kph zone. “I really regret the matter,” he told a local newspaper.
Thanks to those stiff and all-but-guaranteed fines, people hardly ever speed, and as a result, driving is much easier and safer. You’ve got plenty of time to change lanes, react to other cars, and figure out where you need to go. It’s actually rather pleasant. Without the white-knuckle American road culture, you can actually relax and enjoy the driving experience, even in the big city.
Low speeds are also central to pedestrian and cyclist safety on city streets. People are driving so slowly that even if someone darts right out in front of a driver, there is still usually enough time to stop. And if a collision does happen, lower speeds are exponentially safer for everyone involved. One study estimated that the risk of severe injury for a pedestrian struck by a vehicle at 26 kph (16 mph) was about 10 percent, but that increased to 90 percent at 74 kph (46 mph).
The second policy is to provide separate dedicated space for pedestrians, bikes, and public transit. Larger Helsinki streets typically have a sidewalk divided between a pedestrian section and a bike section, a lane for cars, and then a separated tram lane. This means less conflict between pedestrians, cyclists, drivers, and trams — and critically, the trams don’t get stuck in traffic. That means they can bypass any traffic congestion, and so those who don’t need or want to drive will logically opt to take public transit instead, thus letting the car lanes breathe. On smaller side streets, low speeds mean the city can forgo controls of any kind. Many Helsinki intersections don’t have so much as a stop sign; people just have to watch each other and negotiate on the fly — and it works.
Taken together, all this helps create a culture of walking, cycling, and transit use that is safer, healthier, and more efficient. Thanks to these reforms, Helsinki cut its annual pedestrian fatalities from 84 in 1965 to zero in 2019 (though there have been a couple in the subsequent years). Nationally, last year saw the lowest number of traffic deaths ever recorded. Meanwhile, cutting down on automobile trips is part of how Finland slashed its carbon dioxide emissions per capita by about half, from 14 metric tons in 2003 to 7 tons in 2021, as compared to 15 tons in America.
It’s also just more wholesome. Once it sunk in that I was about as safe as it is possible to be on a street, and didn’t have to be looking over my shoulder every few seconds to watch out for a careening 4-ton pickup truck, I felt the sense of peace that comes from releasing a worry that has been there for so long you’d forgotten what it was like to exist without it. Rather than being perceived as some irritating interloper getting in the way of drivers, I felt that I belonged on the street as much as anyone else. Conversely, I started viewing drivers, who invariably stop when anyone approaches a crosswalk, as fellow human beings rather than probable speed-crazed maniacs bent on running me down.
This safety no doubt helps explain why compared to an American city, one sees children on the street far more frequently in Helsinki; either big packs of young schoolchildren wearing high-visibility vests, shepherded by a couple adults, or kids from about seven and up out by themselves or in groups. And that’s despite the fact that the American birthrate is substantially higher than Finland’s. No doubt part of the reason for children being absent from the street is America’s hyper-neurotic parenting culture, but that culture is also fueled by the quite rational worry that unsupervised kids will be obliterated by a speeding lunatic.
It all sounds pretty fancy. But I want to emphasize that Helsinki is not really on the urbanist cutting edge. It still has some wide “stroads” here and there, and compared to, say, Amsterdam it is still relatively car-centric. But that also means that it isn’t too far off from the American city average.
Now, of course America couldn’t simply copy-paste every one of Finland road policies. We have neither the political will nor the administrative capacity to impose six-digit fines on rich jerks speeding through school zones in their Porsche Cayennes. It’s also hard to imagine the kind of stiff taxes on vehicle ownership and gasoline (about three dollars a gallon) that also makes driving much more expensive.
But we could have automatically enforced speed limits. New York City, for example, recently turned its (very limited) collection of speed cameras on continuously, after long delays from car-brained officials. Sure enough, speeding fell sharply along with traffic injuries and deaths of all kinds. We could also reclaim some road space for bike lanes and trams — or even just buses. The average suburban arterial has more than enough space, and e-bikes make many bike trips possible even in low-density sprawl.
Studies demonstrate that a substantial and growing fraction of Americans want to be able to live car-free. Another larger fraction would simply like the option to avoid driving if they don’t want to. The reason so many don’t is the risk. Make walking and cycling safe, and millions more will do it. We wouldn’t make it all the way to Finland’s level without the rest of its policies, but we’d get fairly far.
When reformers propose Finland-style changes to American cities, drivers commonly complain that it would cut into their freedom. But you can still drive just about anywhere in Finland, if you want to. Indeed, it’s much easier and safer to do so than it is in American cities. We have about the worst of all possible worlds, where we’re so dedicated to car supremacy that we’ve made our cities a dangerous, stressful, polluted hellscape even for drivers. There’s a better way.
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Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.
On the week’s top news around renewable energy policy.
1. IRA funding freeze update – Money is starting to get out the door, finally: the EPA unfroze most of its climate grant funding it had paused after Trump entered office.
2. Scalpel vs. sledgehammer – House Speaker Mike Johnson signaled Republicans in Congress may take a broader approach to repealing the Inflation Reduction Act than previously expected in tax talks.
3. Endangerment in danger – The EPA is reportedly urging the White House to back reversing its 2009 “endangerment” finding on air pollutants and climate change, a linchpin in the agency’s overall CO2 and climate regulatory scheme.